Brazil’s brain drain is getting worse

BARBARA GOMES has almost completed her doctorate in biomedicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), one of the best in Brazil. Jobs are scarce and the best she has been able to find is a substitute teaching position at the university that pays around 4,000 reais ($760) a month. For her experiments on a protein associated with mad-cow disease, however, she needs reagents that that university cannot always afford and that cost more than her salary. As a result she, like many of her cohort, wants to leave Brazil. Her plan to move to France was scuppered by the pandemic, but when she finishes her doctorate, she will go: “If I want to work in science, I must leave the country.”

Brazilian emigration to OECD countries has been rising for years, but took off especially in 2017, growing by 24% from the previous year. Nearly 30% of all Brazilians living in OECD countries have a university education. In the past two years, applications by Brazilian skilled workers for permanent visas in the United States, the main destination for those leaving Brazil, rose by 30% to the highest level in at least ten years.

The exodus is mainly the result of economic instability left over from the recession of 2014-16. But it has been worsened by the populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, who sees academics as enemies. His guru, Olavo...